Traditionally, chicken has been packaged in a variety of arrangements, including but not limited to packages of one kind of chicken parts, such as breasts, mixed part packages such as drumsticks and thighs, or "whole" chicken packages including two wings, two drumsticks, two thighs, and a breast. Generally, during the processing operation the chickens are slaughtered and then cut up into individual parts, such as breasts, drumsticks, thighs, and wings. The various parts are transported to packaging stations where they are assembled into the desired packaging configurations, labeled appropriately, wrapped in cellophane, chilled, and either weighed for individual pricing or packed into a cardboard container, and then weighed as a catch weight container. All of the product is packaged without the goal of achieving certain product weight, such as one or two pounds, and then later marked with bar code label for sale in the store. The packaging of chicken parts is as yet a labor intensive process requiring human workers to place the chicken parts into the packages and then wrap them with a transparent wrapping. The need for human intervention in the packaging process is due to the odd shapes and varying sizes of the various chicken parts as well as the need to precisely place them in a package so as to reduce the cost of packaging.
Another factor affecting the cost of packaging chicken is the varying weights of the chicken parts. Packaged chicken parts are most often sold by weight as noted above. The parts do not have a uniform weight, however, which makes sales by weight expensive for the processor. For example, it would be desirable for the processor to sell to the retail store packages of chicken parts that are labeled with bar codes so that the retailer can then sell the packages using conventional scanning equipment to store and record the price of the package. This is currently done, but at great cost to the packager because the individual package weight of the chicken package cannot be easily made uniform. That is, to ensure that the minimum weight of one pound is found in a package of chicken labeled as one pound the processor may include parts that weigh 162 or 17 ounces or more because the parts do not have a uniform weight. Thus, the processor is in fact giving away product in order to be able to sell the product as a bar code labeled product as demanded by the retail outlet and the market. This is known as overpacking and as the amount of overpack increases, the profits of the processor are reduced and, vice versa, as the amount of overpack decreases, the profits of the processor increases. It is thus a desired objective of processors of all products sold by weight in uniformly labeled packages to reduce the amount of overpack. Stated otherwise, unlike cereal and other products sold by weight where the amount of overpack can minimized almost at will, providing a multitude of chicken packages for sale of uniform weight has not been economically possible using current technology and packaging equipment. It would be desirable to provide an apparatus and a method of reducing the amount of overpack in a package of product composed of a varying number of individual parts of non-uniform weight.